In the Choephori or Libation-Pourers, the second play of the trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to avenge his father.  The scene again is in front of the house of Atreus.  Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings, leads her in to die beside her paramour.  He comes out again, bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of Agamemnon;—­but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of matricide weighing on his soul.  The Chorus bids him be of good cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to haunt him, “like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping loathsome blood.”  He must wander the world seeking purification.  In the Eumenides we find him in the temple of Loxias (the Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the god who had prompted him to the deed.  But even there the Furies haunt him—­ though for weariness—­or really because it is the shrine of Loxias—­they have fallen asleep.  From them even Loxias may not free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and assures him meanwhile of his protection.

To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes’ case is tried:  Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury.  The votes of these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into Eumenides—­from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune.  Orestes is free, and the end is happy.

No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle-barker to make it so.  What! clap on an exit to these piled-up miseries?—­he should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares.  But unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of helping, not plaguing, mankind:  he must follow the grand symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and showing the way to its victories, not its defeats.  He had the eye to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism.  He must tell the whole truth:  building up, not merely destroying; and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious.  It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.